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205 Water Street is a part of a suburban developer’s foray into the city. Photo:

205 Water Street is a part of a suburban developer’s foray into the city. (
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At first glance, the sleek new condo building at 205 Water St. in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn doesn’t seem out of the ordinary.

It is certainly striking — nine stories high with a rust-colored Corten steel cantilevered penthouse jutting out from the top floor over Plymouth Street. But this slick-looking structure is very much in tune with the industrial chic of the neighborhood. The lobby is all exposed concrete, the floors steel-plated. A reflecting garden awaits in the courtyard; there is an indigenously landscaped garden on the roof. All 65 apartments are lofts.

But the most striking quality about 205 Water is not obvious from looking at it. The building was conceived, built and developed by Toll Brothers, the Pennsylvania-based home builder best known as the patron saint of the luxury suburban mega-home.

You wouldn’t know it from looking at the building; the angles on the cantilever structure are inspired by the Manhattan Bridge and the walls of the lobby are made of reclaimed boardwalks from Coney Island. The only time the Toll Brothers name appeared was during construction.

But Toll is midway through an extremely ambitious push into big-city real estate, and New York City is its biggest focus by far. 205 Water is one of many Toll Brothers buildings either open or in development in the greater New York City market, and they have been popping up in some of the most desirable addresses in town. Not even Carrie Bradshaw could have done a better job location scouting: in Williamsburg, the company has built Northside Piers, two 30-story, all-glass modern luxury condo towers with open floor apartments, a screening room and a pool. On the Upper East Side, there’s the Touraine, a 22-unit ode to Old World elegance with a concierge, gym, rooftop terrace, library and wine cellar — and an average selling price of some $5 million per unit. A few blocks away, a 16-story white-glove building is planned for East 89th and Park. There are many more.

Is it crazy for the suburban home builder to plant such stakes in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan markets — let alone when the overall economy has yet to fully recover from the mortgage meltdown? Not really. At 205 Water, where prices ranged from $400,000 to $2.5 million, the condos sold out in a year. The Touraine sold 21 of its 22 units within four months; all that remains is the top duplex, which is on the market for $20 million. Toll’s City Living division, which it formed in 2003, has grown to become one of the biggest bright spots in the company’s portfolio.

Our nation’s big cities have bloomed in the last decade, perhaps none as much as New York, and this transformation is one reason Toll and others are charging into urban centers with such force.

But an equally strong driver is a growing sense that modern-day suburbia is no longer fulfilling its promise or position as the central pillar of the American Dream for many of its residents. There are a number of factors behind this shift, but one is the simple design of the suburbs, which, as they grew and expanded over the years, saw an increasing number of suburban residents living at ever-increasing distances from one another and from the places they need to travel to every day.

Some 3.5 million Americans make round-trip commutes of three hours or more, which has a number of health implications and takes a toll on relationships and even family life, the very thing a house with a yard and space was intended to nurture. The yard is wonderful for the children; the two to three hours it takes mom or dad to get to work and back each day is not.

The car-dependent nature of conventional suburban design has other negative implications: it means children are reliant on their parents to get around until they can drive themselves, and it means residents of all ages tend to walk a lot less in the suburbs than they do in more urban developments.

For the past several years, entities ranging from home builders to retailers to corporate office parks have been slowing their expansion into the farthest reaches of suburbia. Rather than a cyclical phenomenon, many are suggesting these trends signify that a new kind of Great Migration is taking place.

But the success of Toll Brothers’ New York properties has surprised even CEO Douglas Yearley’s own expectations. “I would have never thought we’d be building that building at Twenty-eighth and Park Avenue South,” he told me during a phone conversation. “I would have never thought we’d be building at 65th and asking $20 million dollars for a penthouse.”

All told, at the time of our conversation, Toll Brothers had close to 20 separate buildings in the New York City market. Before we hung up, he told me there were plans for close to a dozen more.

Leigh Gallagher is assistant managing editor at Fortune Magazine and author of “The End of the Suburbs” (Penguin/Portfolio), out now.